Microsoft fattens Exchange Online mailboxes to 50GB

With SkyDrive also boosted this week, does Redmond have a new storage rig?

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Microsoft's Exchange Online service now comes with bigger mailboxes.

Redmond has let it be known that henceforth Exchange Online mailboxes will offer 50 gigabytes of capacity, up from 25. Kiosk mailboxes go from one to two gigabytes. Shared mailboxes and those for Resources now have 10GB to play with, more than twice their previous capacity.

Put on your best advertorial voice now and ask yourself just how much you would expect to pay for all that extra storage? If you said double the price you're wrong. Redmond isn't going to charge you a red cent/rupee/yen for the extra storage. Not one.

Would it be unkind to suggest another interpretation of that line is “Part of the way we compete with Google is to surpass the 30GB it offers Apps customers?” Indeed, Microsoft is now making Google look rather miserly, as the 25GB it now offers SkyDrive Pro users on top of the 50GB mailbox means it's more than doubled the data allocation offered by The Chocolate Factory.

Let's also ponder just how Microsoft is able to increase the capacity offered to SkyDrive Pro and Exchange Online customers in the same week. Vulture South's money is on a new storage rig coming into production somewhere in Redmond's network of data centres, perhaps with some spare capacity to handle all the signups to online services Windows 8.1 is sure to generate. ®